Two old war criminals resurfaced in recent days into Myanmar’s convoluted political scene. Thein Swe and Hla Min, former military intelligence (MI) officers in the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) and State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) regimes, made a surprise appearance in Beijing to meet with Chinese think-tanks. The two, purportedly working for the unknown “Paragon Institute” in Myanmar, met with the Charhar Institute and Taihe Institute, both of which are close to the Chinese government and advise on security issues. It was a curious coincidence just days before the head of the State Administration Council (SAC) Min Aung Hlaing traveled to Yunnan on an official visit.
What were two old spooks doing there? According to a statement from the Charhar Institute, the two former officers “provided an update on the situation in Myanmar, particularly regarding the country’s internal security situation.” The visit sparked speculation on why the two would come out of reported retirement to take part in what appears to be “Track Two diplomacy” as China expands its support for the SAC and Min Aung Hlaing’s supposed transition plan of elections in 2025. This can only be bad news for two reasons, the first being they’re likely out of touch with a highly complex conflict reality in Myanmar, and second, they both built 40-year careers lying for a living.
Ex-Brigadier General Thein Swe was the head of international relations in the Directorate of Defense Services Intelligence (DDSI), a key deputy to the notorious Lieutenant General Khin Nyunt, who led MI for over two decades. This was a period of widespread repressive surveillance, with mass arrests, torture and imprisonment of dissidents, journalists, political rivals, poets and artists, and anyone who spoke out against the military. MI and Khin Nyunt were also key actors in making peace deals with ethnic insurgents, and in return permitted many of them to expand involvement in the illicit narcotics trade, natural resource extraction and other business opportunities. Thein Swe was a prime time spokesperson for this repressive apparatus.
MI was purged in late-2004 by then dictator Senior General Than Shwe, with several hundred officers arrested throughout Myanmar. Thein Swe was sentenced to 146 years on 13 various charges. He was eventually released in 2014, along with 3,000 other prisoners. On his release, he was asked about the legacy of MI’s crimes, and responded: “I have no comment about this, everyone has their own opinion. It is true that some [former MI officers] feel sorry that they are viewed as bad guys. From a religious point of view, we have to pay back for the wrong we did in previous lives. While we have done our best for our country, we have to suffer for what we did wrong in past incarnations. Let bygones be bygones. There is no need to have particular feelings about this now.”
Since his release he has been widely perceived as politically inactive, with little clear role in the “transition” led by former President U Thein Sein, and since the SAC coup was cast as “elderly and ailing” at over 80 years of age. His visit to Beijing suggests he has some fitness to engage. But what exactly his role in the “Paragon Institute” is, and what relation they have with the regime, is a matter of speculation, insinuation, and a great deal of anger from people in Myanmar who still harbor anger at all former MI operatives. The harmless old codger defense doesn’t cut it.
Former Australian Ambassador Trevor Wilson, in his 2016 book Eye Witness to Early Reform in Myanmar, wrote of the MI clique: “OSS staff tended to be well educated, had good policy skills, and spoke good English, and they were noticeably comfortable, indeed confident, in dealing with foreigners…Khin Nyunt and his deputy, Major-General Kyaw Win, were generally impressive and competent, and their senior colleagues, Brigadier-General Thein Swe and Brigadier-General Kyaw Thein (on narcotics and ethnic issues), were also cooperative and efficient. Ultimately, OSS staff tended to be somewhat cocky and perhaps over-confident in their role, and this may be why they were a particular target for the purge.”
Hla Min, a former colonel in the Office of Strategic Studies (OSS), an MI think tank, was perceived as a key strategist of the MI maneuvering during the SLORC/SPDC period. He was also purged in 2004, being released in 2011. Hla Min was different than many of his contemporaries at the Defense Services Academy (DSA) as he grew up largely in the West as the son of a Myanmar diplomat, so a kind of Sit Tat “repat.” But his loyalty to the military institution was always total, and belied the bogus notion of Western acculturation leading to more liberal views and democratic leanings. He served for 32 years in the military, first as a frontline officer in the North East Command then in the South East region, before becoming general staff officer and eventually joining the DDSI. Few photos exist of him, although the best known is a portrait from 1977 at the “Frontier Area”, sporting an impressive hipster beard.
Hla Min was also well known for authoring a prominent book of the priorities, grievances, gripes, and delusions of the military regime called The Way I See It: Myanmar and its Evolving Global Role, 1988-2012. First published in Myanmar and English in 1997, it went through 29 editions (that this analyst is aware of) with the 29th edition being published in 2013, “to update and inform its readers of the development taking place in the country and the complex realities surrounding it.” It was originally entitled Political Situation of Myanmar and its Role in the Region, part of the canon of military propaganda that included such classics as Skyful of Lies and Conspiracy of Treasonous Minions Within the Myanmar Naing-Ngan and Traitorous Cohorts Abroad. Those were the days.
Textbook example of military propaganda
The Way I See It contains all the paranoid obsessions of the SLORC/SPDC period. It has sections on foreign policy, human rights and democracy, development efforts of the military regime, pressure from the outside world, especially the West, the International Labor Organization (ILO), relations with China, return of American military remains from World War II, and the long drawn out political transition that culminated in the 2010 election. There are numerous appendices on race and religion: interestingly, Hla Min counts only 134 taiyingthar (national races), not the standard 135, as he excludes Kachin. There are also highly dubious charts of religious breakdowns in every state and region, proof of the military obsession with counting everything, regardless of accuracy.
And no military propaganda product would be complete without exhaustive photo sets of the chaos of the 1988 Uprising, that monk with an MG-42 machine gun, severed heads and burned out police stations, along with Mrauk U temples, Bagan, Mandalay Palace, the Myanmar harp, Thingyan (water festival), oil and gas projects, forestry and agriculture, and the obligatory series of jade, gems, rubies and sapphires. This cataloguing of natural loot and culture is unsettling when you understand how much the military, not just DDSI, was plundering it all, at the expensive of Myanmar people and the environment.
The sections on the drug trade were a mainstay of military propaganda since the 1988 Uprising, denouncing the suspension of United States counter-narcotics aid and how Myanmar had to bear the brunt of suppression efforts. “Myanmar has without any substantial outside assistance managed from 1988 up to 1996, to prevent $45 billion worth of heroin from reaching the U.S. streets…Myanmar casualties consisted of 766 law enforcement officials killed in action while 2300 were seriously wounded.” What streets were those? Successive military efforts at drug eradication progress, with the annual “destruction ceremonies” have always had a farcical aspect to them, but they do resonate with many diplomats and international organizations. Myanmar’s narcotics trade has always involved the military in multiple ways, and the contemporary growth of crystal methamphetamine production in northern Shan State over the past decade is yet another example.
The “unconditional surrender” of Shan strongman Khun Sa of the Mong Tai Army (MTA) in 1996 is a central feature of “success” in the war against drugs Hla Min tries to argue. Khun Sa’s surrender did actually come with conditions, as he was allowed to “retire” to Yangon and his army largely disbanded, although the remnants soon formed the Shan State Army (South). Nowhere does Hla Min link the drug trade to a broader settlement of the civil war, a constant denial of the dynamics of insurrection and extractive industries.
The military always attempted to segue from complaints over drug eradication to boasting about how it prevailed over multiple insurgencies during periods of international isolation. “This resulted in the Myanmar Defence Forces becoming one of the toughest armies in the region and a sufferer of the highest casualty rate in the world.” He doesn’t provide any figures to justify this claim.
This is linked to the intense pressure the SLORC/SPDC felt from the ILO from 1997 on the widespread use of forced labor. “To go deeper into the subject of forced labor the initial allegation levelled against the Myanmar Government was FORCED PORTERAGE [an exuberant use of bold upper case there]…Especially in a country like Myanmar where most of the battles are being fought in jungles and mountainous regions, strong and healthy men from nearby villages are employed when necessary to carry the sick and wounded.” This is dehumanizing misinformation, when forced labor was exhaustively well documented, and battle zones throughout Myanmar had extensive trails of dead civilians and convict porters. Yet it partly worked, with those intent on understanding the military buying at least some of these counter-narratives of giving the army space and time to modernize and improve their performance. As evidenced by the neo-medievalism of the military’s conduct since 2021, they clearly didn’t reform at all.
For a book on understanding Myanmar’s role in the world, As I See It is remarkably ignorant on global affairs. The sections on China are obsessed with asserting that Myanmar is the “Weak Link in the Regional China Containment Policy” by the United States. 20 years after first writing this, Hla Min is strangely vindicated: Myanmar is the weakest link in any containment policy, having fallen back into the clutches of Beijing. The illegal seizure of power in 2021 certainly sealed that. There are numerous positive lines in the book on Myanmar joining the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) and being a positive regional actor, but nothing beyond broad platitudes.
But in re-reading The Way I See It, it’s striking how quickly the military propaganda machine snapped back to its mercurial worldview after the coup d’etat. It had never disappeared, but it did reassert immediately after the coup. There are similar themes that still grip the military mentality in the SAC era: the outside world is being unfair, pressure never works, sanctions hurt the people, and the efforts of the ‘government’ to develop the country are not recognized. It is a victim mentality that runs deep within the military psyche that clashes with their arrogant and intransigent bombast.
There have been a number of books written by senior military officers from past regimes, few of them trustworthy or particularly insightful. Akin to As I See It, they all have that pompous literary style of the military martinet, a thuggish certainty of their own convictions. Thura Shwe Mann’s The Lady, I and Affairs of State, might be an amusing double entendre, but it failed to present any real details of his vexatious role in the 2011-2021 ‘discipline flourishing parliamentary period.’ Some of the memoirs of fighting generals are useful for a one-sided perspective of the nature of military campaigns, but almost by and large, propaganda abounds over anything approaching honesty.
A legacy of impunity
It’s unlikely that Thein Swe and Hla Min are becoming the tip of the diplomatic spear for the SAC. It’s more likely that China is seeking as many varied perspectives from the military establishment as possible. The recent trip may be a case of older generations being dragooned back into play as Beijing doesn’t fully trust Min Aung Hlaing and his henchmen. The visit did however dredge up past enmity, suspicion and anger at the reappearance of some of the MI cabal. Despite spending time in prison as a result of an internal regime purge, both former MI officers have never faced any form of justice for their indisputable crimes.
The creation of the Myanmar Times in 2000 is perceived by many to have been a military intelligence operation to establish a ‘reformist’ media that could proffer a more open perspective on Myanmar than state media was incapable of. The official license was granted to Thein Swe’s son, Sonny Swe (now the publisher of Frontier Myanmar), who formed Myanmar Consolidated Media with controversial Australian journalist Ross Dunkley. It is probably no coincidence that the 29th edition of As I See It in early 2013 was published by MCM Books, a subsidiary of Myanmar Consolidated Media. This was at a point when the English language version of the Myanmar Times was being widely feted as the transition paper of record. An effective OSS operation.
It should serve as a reminder of the legacy of military intelligence and their pernicious intrusion into so many aspects of Myanmar life. Two other media licenses were granted in 2000 for The Voice Daily, to Ye Naing Win, the son of Khin Nyunt, and 7 Day to Thaung Su Nyein, the son of Brigadier General Win Aung, who was then foreign minister of the SPDC and who died in prison in 2009 after the purge five years previously. The DDSO media operation certainly had some level of success, as evidenced by former Ambassador Wilson’s assessment and other diplomats of the contrived ‘charm offensive’ during the 2000-2004 period when Khin Nyunt was spuriously cast as a reformer.
The enmity towards the former MI officers is undoubtedly legitimate. However, the opposition complex and the independent Myanmar media should also admit that ‘their’ side has numerous ghosts in the closet too. Ronald Aung Naing, a former leader of the All Burma Students Democratic Front (ABSDF) responsible for the torture and execution of 15 colleagues on Feb. 12, 1992, along with the deaths of 20 more and the torture of over 80 others in Kachin State, still attends public events in exile, with little censure. The trade unionist Maung Maung has been accused, by the former MI propaganda machine repeatedly, of terrorist activity, although many in the exile movement suspect some of the charges have merit. And disgraced former Karen National Defense Organization (KNDO) commander Ner Dah Mya has been accused of a string of abuses for many years, even before he publicly admitted and justified the 2021 mass killing by his forces of civilian workers.
Thein Swe and Hla Min’s trip may be one small, sinister oddity in a swiftly evolving international narrative over Myanmar. Reanimating past purveyors of propaganda spin has a retro air about it, but the bigger picture is how much international opinion is looking for an alternative to the depraved logic of the SAC and the increasingly unconvincing assertions from the National Unity Government (NUG). Much of it is over the possibility of elections in 2025, the imperfect vehicle of a potential transition platform. China seems to support such a plan, and ASEAN and the West may not be far behind.
There has been a marked reprise of the insidious “inside/outside” character of debates over Myanmar from the 2000s, a divide stoked in part by MI’s machinations, and which lingered long after their purge. The Beijing trip could also auger a Myanmar military diplomatic counteroffensive as the country heads into a fifth year of destructive civil war.
David Scott Mathieson is an independent analyst working on conflict, humanitarian and human rights issues on Myanmar
